A pet peeve of mine is College/Unis that are actually high schools.
That building and how it functions is definitely a high school. Sarah's story also doesn't really make sense if they are college aged. She is an adult. She doesn't have to tag along just because her dad moved for a job. If we are generous and consider that school a community college, it really doesn't make sense for her to move with her parents just to end up at a shitty community college. There are government assistance programs like FAFSA that helps with tuition and expenses if financing her education was an issue. People go out of state all the time for higher education anyways, so why does she have to follow her dad during this period of her life? And if we say that it's a community college, MC's family is really aiming for the low hanging fruit in education if they are both voluntarily going to the same community college. That conflicts with the sis's backstory of being a super nerd who cares about her grades and studies 24/7.
I get it. Patreon is a thing. 18+ is a thing. Assets for the environment are thing. But that's the kind of thing that should be written around. MC and sis can be fraternal twins in their senior year of high school for example. Or you could write the script as if it was actually set in a community college. Or find better assets to portray a more typical university experience.
Anyways... things like this does really cut down on the immersion factor for me. The 4th wall breaking was very aggressive as well. I could live with it for tutorials and maybe even internal monologues, but when it seeps into actual spoken dialogue between characters, that's pushing it.
At some point, I got into the mindset that this will be strictly a gotta catch em all power fantasy. Well, obviously, that description is the main point of this game by design, and things are looking quite good in that front, but I guess I hoped the setting was crafted with more attention to detail. The plans for the mind control corruption aspect and the eventual "reprogramming" is looking real promising, though.
I think the gameplay systems in place are quite good. It's barebones right now, but that's basically all sandbox games in their infancy. It's just a matter of filling out the world. Admittedly, most sandbox games never manage to fill out the sandbox they created, but there are some shining examples of success too. High Rise Climb and A Spell for All to name a couple.
